


your face, the ghost that keeps me on the ground

by fisherqueens



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: M/M, Post-Episode: e018 Juno Steel and the Final Resting Place
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-22
Updated: 2017-04-22
Packaged: 2018-10-22 13:18:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10697802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fisherqueens/pseuds/fisherqueens
Summary: juno’s got ghosts in all shapes and sizes. this one just happens to be his favorite and his least favorite all at once.





	your face, the ghost that keeps me on the ground

_“If you could do it all over again, would you leave?”_  
  
Juno says nothing. He looks down into his glass.  
  
Once upon a time, he told a slender knife of a man that he wasn’t much of a sobber, but the sound that comes out of him now is more raw than anything. It encompasses a memory: warm breath, tenderness, and it goes around his shoulders like a heavy shawl, bearing its weight down upon him. In this moment, staring into this glass, he is reminded of just how fucking alone he’s gone and made himself. _But really, I don’t deserve this_ , he says to no one save himself of course, thinking of the bed and of the sheets, and of the guilty weight of his gun sliding into his holster, the guiltier slide of the door. _I don’t deserve these good things._  
  
Peter leans in the doorway, but it isn’t really Peter. A shadow that looks like Peter, all pale and pretty. “If you could do it all again, Juno,” Peter whispers. “Would you still leave?”  
  
-  
  
_If I could do it all again, I’d probably still leave,_  Juno tells himself, laying awake with the ghost of a man beside him, sliding arms around him, pressing up along his side like a snake, as if he wanted to tattoo himself onto his ribs, his hips, his thighs. The phantom sensation of a mouth, soft and silken, grazes over his nose and he closes his eyes, lets it happen, indulges as quietly as he dares for a few moments. He relives the sensation of Nureyev bearing down over him with his mouth, with his body, sinuous and beautiful and _absolutely his_ for the hours that pass. He whispers his name and Nureyev seems to bow to it, a hand around the throat, fingers crooking gently inside of him, the rush that floods through him.  
  
(They spend the night together. The night is not long enough. The night stretches and Nureyev bares his pale throat and Juno sinks his teeth into it like a desperate, hungry animal and they push and shove and bruise and press with the intent of imprinting themselves into each other, down to carving their names into each others’ very bones.)  
  
Peter Nureyev disappears when he breathes in and opens his eyes to stare at the dark ceiling overhead. Somehow his cologne, or some scent-driven memory, keeps it there, holding him down, becoming apart of him. The hooks of Nureyev’s entire being are sunken deep inside of him, flourished by that one letter he can’t throw out, the one where Nureyev had written his own name in his own handwriting.  
  
_It would take someone very special,_  Nureyev had purred to him. _Purred_.  
  
Juno breathes in.  
  
Juno breathes out.  
  
It’s like Nureyev’s molecules are imbued in the atmosphere around him, permanently anchored into his life even though he’d left the man almost six months ago.  
  
-  
  
Juno does _not_ regret.  
  
Regret means he didn’t do the right thing. Regret means that in his heart, what he wanted wasn’t really what he wanted.  
  
But what if he wants both? What if he wants this city and what if he wants Peter decorated by the rising of Mars’ twin suns? What if he wants Nureyev colored bright by the Martian sunrise, like a guardian angel and a sly devil all at once, silhouetted and sharing the skyline with him, sharing the same coffee with him, sharing the same bed, breaking the same bread.   
  
Why can’t he have both? Why does he have to run away no matter what? Stay and leave a piece of his heart with Nureyev. Leave and a piece of him stays in the dingy old office and with Rita and with Old Town and with Hyperion City crying blood from its gutters. Juno can’t leave it. He’s shackled in a way, the only way he likes. This city is his and he knows it’ll be his until the day he dies.  
  
He presses his cheek to his palm and dozes. In his dreams, the window opens soundlessly and Peter climbs through like a dime novel bandit, stinking the place up with his cologne, a sharp and beautiful spice-laden scent. And when Peter gets close enough, they kiss and the taste of his mouth is sinful and rich, like the finest, sharpest whiskey Juno has ever tasted. He isn’t much for sloppy kisses, but god he could eat Nureyev alive and still never be satisfied sucking down the taste of him.  
  
When he wakes up, there’s a bottle on his desk, a beautiful thing with dark liquid inside and a label that Juno doesn’t have to read to know it’s _the good stuff._  
  
It’s not whiskey.  
  
It’s something else. Juno takes the bottle in his hands and turns it over a few times, thumbing the sinuous curves of it, holding it up to the light and seeing the liquid inside shift from brown to sunset orange to a brilliant red and back again. The name is something that Juno isn’t even going to _try_ to pronounce, but it declares itself to be rather pricey spiced Brahmese rum.  
  
He doesn’t crack it open, instead, dumping the bottle into his desk and slamming the bottom most drawer shut.  
  
His lips still tingle from a kiss that can’t possibly be real and the breeze to his left is most definitely not coming from the window that he remembers being shut prior to closing his eyes.  
  
“You bastard,” he whispers. Like a ghost. Come to haunt him.

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi to me on [tumblr](http://fisherqueens.tumblr.com) c:
> 
> **update:** i had a username change from ` PUELLA` to `FISHERQUEENS` for the curious. it's still me.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] your face, the ghost that keeps me on the ground](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12114780) by [ZoeBug](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZoeBug/pseuds/ZoeBug)




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